Archive for the ‘Friends’ category

This Friday past, I found myself in need of a brief mental diversion. As luck would have it, Justin of 3AM had made stems available from a new track of his entitled “Oceanside.” And so this remix was born:

I did this in just under ten minutes, from opening Audiomulch to running some quick final touches on it in Sound Forge. I chose to go with something more musical than my usual drone/ambient/noise thing, since the audience at AD is likely to be less in to that sort of thing. Played MrRay73 (an e-piano VSTi plugin) into Loopyllama, recorded a quick 8 bar loop and one overdub, stopped, added effects, moved the e-piano over to a second mixer channel, added some more effects, hit record, played along with loop, saved, added a fade and some compression in Sound Forge, and saved. All done rather stream-of-consciousness stylee, as I had no preconceptions or specific ideas as I went in. There’s some flubs in there, it’s mostly plunky aimless stuff (although I think it turned out pleasantly entertaining), and the fade isn’t quite right, but then, it was all done in under ten minutes after all.

Hop on over here to Chris’s blog to check out what others have done and to post your own. Chris will pick his favourites from the bunch and give them a free copy of the forthcoming Audio Damage Automaton effect plugin. I already have Automaton, so I’m not in the running for the prize.

Word has come that Juan Antonio Arguelles, well-known among the world’s loosely held computer music community as Arguru, died on June 3rd, 2007, in a car accident. He was a software developer, and if such a thing as a canon of independent music software developers should ever exist, he would certainly be high among their ranks. For a while, it seemed that near every tracker in existence stemmed from his code: Noisetrekker, Renoise, Psycle, FastFucker, TraxVox, Aeonix, Aodix, FreeBase. And a litany of other bits of software all over the place, including some 36 machines in Buzz, the DiscoDSP plugins, the massive synth Voyager, and the most excellent sampler Directwave.

I didn’t know the man well but have had the occasional exchange with him on web forums over the years, always pleasant, and have been a fan of his work for years. What has always struck me about him was his persistent generosity as a programmer. Much of his software was given away free, and the source code of many of the trackers he initially developed was made public (most of them can still be found floating around various tracker shrines).

It is sad, if inevitable, to see the passing of a fellow traveler. Argu was one of the good ones and will be missed.